10Ants Hill’s Racket Fury: Table Tennis VR is set to launch on Sony’s headset on October 2nd. The game has been available on other platforms, including Oculus and SteamVR (where it holds a very positive rating) since late last year, but arrives on Sony’s headset with full support for the PlayStation Move controllers. Check out the trailer below.

Is it just me or is there a robotic version of Mass Effect’s Krogan in there? Anyway, the game’s going to launch with its single-player mode intact, which features four cups and 16 AI opponents to take on. The multiplayer mode that’s in the other versions won’t feature straight away, but 10Ants says it’s working on adding it in.

The Creator Lab goes international as YouTube’s VR180 bootcamp makes its way to London. This week the YouTube Creator Lab closed its doors in London, England, officially wrapping an intense, three-day VR180 bootcamp that included some of YouTube’s best and brightest European, Middle Eastern, and African creators. Eleven teams gathered at YouTube Space London to

Oculus CTO John Carmack finished his day two keynote mid-sentence at Oculus Connect after talking continuously for an hour and a half.

It takes time to digest a Carmack keynote but you can now rewatch at your leisure below. If you’d rather not watch, we’ve broken out five key takeaways below related to Oculus Go.

Oculus Go is retaining users like Rift does

Carmack said Gear VR users typically stop using the device after initially enjoying it, while Rift users have shown a tendency to come back to play VR week after week.

With the standalone Oculus Go, however, Carmack says retention levels are closer to what the Rift is seeing. They don’t know the cause yet, but theories include the fact that people often think about the battery life of their phone before slotting it into a VR headset. Battery life is still a problem with Oculus Go, but you don’t have to worry about draining the most important gadget in your day too quickly if the device is separate.

“People come back to Rift week after week” says @ID_AA_Carmack. Surpassing even his expectations, though, Carmack says Oculus Go “is retaining as well as Rift.” #OC5

— Upload (@UploadVR) September 27, 2018

Oculus Go sells more $250 units than $200 ones

This was a surprise that doesn’t really seem like a surprise in retrospect, but a majority of buyers choose to spend the extra $50 to double the storage on Oculus Go from 32 GB to 64 GB, according to Carmack. The 32 GB version sells for around $200 while the 64 GB version sells for around $250.

The higher storage capacity 64 GB Oculus Go headset ($250) has sold more units than the 32 GB ($200) entry level device, according to @ID_AA_Carmack #OC5

— Upload (@UploadVR) September 27, 2018

Casting will dramatically upgrade the Oculus Go experience

We’ve been asking Carmack about casting the view from Oculus Go to a nearby phone for months now and it seems the feature is finally nearing release. Carmack believes the feature will end up being “a big win” for Oculus as it will give people a lot of reasons to share their VR experiences with friends and family, including advising or accompanying a player through their experience.

Battery life would be the biggest priority in an upgraded Oculus Go

Of all the things which could be improved about Oculus Go, Carmack suggested battery life would be the top priority in any theoretical second generation of the headset.

That’s right, Carmack actually suggested Oculus Go could get a second generation. Aside from the fact that fixing this problem would dramatically improve Go, this is the first time we’ve heard someone at Oculus suggest the device could see future upgrades with new hardware.

Oculus Wants To ‘Defy Distance’ With TV

Oculus’ new mission to ‘defy distance‘ is playing itself out on Oculus Go as Facebook focuses on making a quality co-watching experience for television. The goal is so that it genuinely feels like you are sharing a room with a friend and watching TV together. It’s

John Carmack sees the Nintendo Switch as the main competition for Oculus’ latest VR headset, the Oculus Quest.

The Oculus CTO said as much in his keynote speech at Oculus Connect today. “Realistically, we are going to wind up competing with the Nintendo Switch as a device,” Carmack stated. He continued, explaining that he sees Quest as the mobile gaming device that existing console owners would pick up. “I don’t think there’s going to be that many people that say “I’m not going to buy a PS4, I’m going to buy a Quest instead,”” he said.

Quest is indeed a mobile gaming device, though it offers a drastically different experience to the Switch, which has sold around 20 million units since launch last year. Switch acts as a hybrid home console that you can pick up an take with you, though Quest will undoubtedly still mostly be played in people’s homes rather than, say, on the train. Quest will also cost $399 when it launches next year, whilst Switch is $100 less at $300. Quest will have an uphill battle for consumers wallets against Nintendo for sure, though Carmack never actually said he expects Oculus to win.

During the OC5 day one keynote, I was most excited to see Superhot VR confirmed for the Oculus Quest. When I played it, I was blown away and honestly felt like it was the ideal way to play the game going forward. But what I didn’t expect is to also really, really enjoy Tennis Scramble. So much so in fact, I think it’s the only one of the four Quest demos that I’m tempted to go wait in the non-press line for just so I can try it again against someone else. Competitive multiplayer has that effect on me sometimes. Dead and Buried in a 4,000 square foot arena with six Quest headsets gave me a similar feeling.

Other than not holding a real racket (that could be resolved with some plastic accessories) and not hitting a real ball (a minor loss by comparison) I may as well have been playing real tennis. During the Tennis Scramble demo I was running from side to side on my end of the court, returning balls, and building up volleys with my opponent.

I had to turn my body for backhand shots and actually jog over to the ball on several occasions. People liked to compare Wii Sports to real tennis, but for all intents and purposes, this was actually quite close.

Now the major caveat here is that this is an accessible arcade-style game, not a sport simulation, so take that comparison with a grain of salt. There are lots of little Mario Tennis-style flourishes in Tennis Scramble as well. During the match power ups would pop up over the net at the center of the court and when I hit them with the ball they’d do things like change my opponent’s racket size, change the ball size, or even raise the net higher.

Tracking worked great as well. Even if I was looking down court and swinging to my side, the headset’s cameras didn’t lose track of my controllers. This is because even if I can’t see my hands in VR because of the limited field of view, the cameras on the outside of the headset still can since there are four in the corners of the device. It can see a lot more than my eyes can inside the headset, so I don’t even notice the loss of tracking if it ever occurred.